WANDERING STAR
by
J.M.G. LeCl zio
Curbstone Press
Paper, 316 pages, $15
ISBN 1-931896-11-9
In Wandering Star, J.M.G. LeCl zio does not use traditional narrative but tells the story by shifting among multiple points of view first-person, third-person, omniscient sometimes within the same paragraph. He does not develop character so much as paint moving images of the human condition. He does not judge as much as report. He is, in the purest sense, a stylist more a poet of language and symbol than a novelist of prose. But this is a novel, one of shifting tense, both past and present, sometimes in the same scene. And the beauty of LeCl zio s language belies the horror of his subject. For this is the story, primarily, of Esther Gr ve, whom her father calls Estrellita ( little star ).
She
is a child of Jewish descent in the mountains of
The true edge of emotion does not boil to the surface until Esther meets, for the briefest moment, Nejma, a Palestinian girl now displaced by the displaced but incoming Jews. Such unhappy irony is thick with misfortune. In this momentary encounter, Nejma writes her name, and only her name, on a blank piece of paper from a notebook in which she has been recording her own suffering and wandering, then gives the page with her name on it to Esther.
She handed the notebook and the
pencil to Esther, so that she too would write down her name. She stood there for another minute, hugging
the notebook to her breast, as if it were the most important thing in the
world. Finally, without saying a word
she went back toward the group of refugees who were walking away. Esther took a step toward her, to call her,
to hold her back, but it was too late.
She had to get back into the truck.
The convoy started driving in the midst of the dust cloud again. But Esther couldn t wipe from her mind
Nejma s face, her eyes, her hand lying on her arm, the deliberate solemnity of
her gestures as she extended the notebook where she had written her name. She couldn t forget the women s faces, their
averted eyes, the fear on the children s faces, or the heavy silence on the
land, in the shadows of the ravines, around the fountain.
The story of Nejma s brutal stay in the Palestinian refugee camp is the most searing part of the book. Their only food is rationed by the infrequent United Nations convoy. The only water comes from wells so thick with mud it takes all day for the mud to settle to the bottom of the water pail, only a small amount of water leaking out of the settling mud. As Nejma says:
The Nour Chams Camp is
undoubtedly the very end of the world because it seems to me that beyond this
point there can be nothing else, there is no hope left. The days begin adding up. They are just like the fine dust that comes
from nowhere, invisible and intangible, that covers everything, your clothing,
the roofs of the tents, your hair and even your skin, I can feel the weight of
that dust, it mingles with the water I drink, I can taste it in my food and on
my tongue when I awake in the morning.
Above the camp on top of a rocky hill, the refugees bury an old Bedouin shepherd named Old Nas, and it is his plaintive refrain that rings from the novel: Does the sun not shine for us all? But if the sun is meant for all and is the sustenance of life as it is for Esther who, pregnant, feels as if her unborn son is like a ray of sun life is nearly as unmerciful for the Palestinian refugees displaced by Jews as it was for Jews who had been hunted, tattooed, and chased to extermination by the Germans. Good conscience should neither forget the gas chambers nor the image of Nejma s camp:
the ordinary faces of childhood seemed already wilted with
incomprehensible old-age. Scrawny little
girls with stooped shoulders, their bodies floating in dresses that were too
big for them, young boys half-naked, with bowed legs, huge knees, dark gray
ash-colored skin, scalps mottled with ringworm, eyes devoured by gnats.
If there is misery, there is also hope, including Nejma s hope that Esther will read the account of the refugee camp.
I m waiting for her too, for her, Esther Gr ve, the girl who wrote
her name on the top of the first page in the notebook on the road to Latrun
Spring, in the hopes that she will one day read all of this and come to see
me. She came that day, and I saw my
destiny in her face. We were united for
a brief moment, as if we had always been meant to meet each other. When I ve finished writing these notebooks,
I ll give them to one of the United Nations soldiers and ask him to take them
to her, wherever she is. That s why I
have the strength to write, despite the loneliness and the madness all
around.
Esther, too, desires to reach out to Nejma, my
sister, with an Indian profile and pale eyes, she whom I met only once, by pure
chance, on the road to Siloam, near
Sometimes it seems I can feel the light touch of her hand lying on
my arm, I sense the questioning look in her eyes, I watch her as she writes her
name slowly in Roman letters on the first page of her black notebook. It is the only thing about her that I am
still certain of, after all these years, that black notebook in which I too
wrote my name, as if in a mysterious pact.
What LeCl zio accomplishes is a tapestry woven from images of despair and hope despair symbolized in the Arab tale of two brothers of the same father but different mothers, and the enmity between the brothers which destroys a garden both wish to possess; and stark, difficult hope in the form of a poem by Hayyim Nahman Bialik:
Brother, brother,
have pity on the black eyes beneath
us,
for we are weary, for we share in
your pain.
I did not gain my light in the
courtyards of liberty.
I did not receive it from my father,
I tore it from my own flesh,
I carved it in my own heart.
We can only hope that Esther and Nejma might someday walk out of these pages, meet once more, and plant and nourish the garden that others battle to destroy.
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